Blue-Collar Renaissance: Texas Recalls How to Win

MILWAUKEE — Smiles abounded in the Texas locker room on Friday, not quite 24 hours after the Longhorns won their first N.C.A.A. tournament game in three years. Players who were not interviewed pulled chairs near one another to chat, joke and laugh. And no one signaled disengagement by strapping on headphones or ear buds.

A tight crew drew even tighter after Cameron Ridley’s buzzer-beating putback beat Arizona State, 87-85, at Bradley Center on Thursday night. One year after a splintered, self-centered Texas team missed the tournament for the first time since Coach Rick Barnes arrived in Austin in 1999, the Longhorns had a signature victory to share.

This group — with one junior playing regularly and without a senior on the roster — halted the downward course of the program and probably saved Barnes’s job. Texas, the seventh seed in the Midwest Region, can reach the Round of 16 for the first time since 2008 on Saturday if it upsets No. 2 seed Michigan at Bradley Center.

“We think that the fact we won the game in the manner we did will bring these guys even closer to one another, because they all have just experienced something they have seen on TV their whole lives,” said the associate head coach Rob Lanier, the former head coach at Siena. “They had a chance to do it for the first time in their lives. It only strengthens the bond that got them here in the first place.”

Michigan and Texas are meeting for the first time in the tournament since 1996, when Maceo Baston of the Wolverines called a timeout that Michigan did not have in the final seconds of an 80-76 loss, reprising the mistake made by Chris Webber in the 1993 N.C.A.A. final.

Barnes said the bond among current players had been missing at Texas for some time.

“A year ago, I wasn’t very happy at all because of the way we were,” he said. “I knew we had to make changes. I knew that before the end of the year. We made those changes.”

Lanier understood. He spent two years as a member of Barnes’s original staff in 1999 before moving to Siena, then to Virginia and Florida as an assistant before returning in 2011. In his view, the Texas program began losing its way in the mid-2000s, when Barnes transformed it from the scrappy little brother to Texas Longhorns football to a fast-moving incubator for N.B.A. prospects.

“From my vantage point, the culture had been lost in a lot of ways,” Lanier said. “The way I saw it, Coach had always developed a blue-collar mentality because he had been at places — Providence and Clemson — where he was somewhere near the bottom half of the food chain, trying to ascend to the top with a chip on his shoulder. The chip is still there.

“But one of the dynamics that changed, and it started with recruitment of T. J. Ford, is he was running a program that had moved to the top of the food chain,” Lanier added. “What had been once perceived primarily as just a football school had become a gateway to the N.B.A. Players started to come to Texas with a different mind-set.”

Texas reached the Final Four with Ford in 2003, and the Round of 16 three times in the next five years. But by 2011-12, something was missing. After the Longhorns finished 20-12 and lost their N.C.A.A. tournament opener to Cincinnati, 65-59, the junior guard and leading scorer J’Covan Brown declared for the N.B.A. draft but was not selected.

Last season, point guard Myck Kabongo missed the first 23 games under an N.C.A.A. penalty for accepting impermissible benefits and lying to university officials about it.

All season long, Barnes chafed, trying to get his guys to play hard. Texas finished 16-18, ending its streak of 14 consecutive N.C.A.A. appearances.

“It’s tough when you have to coach effort instead of coaching basketball,” said guard Demarcus Holland, then a freshman. “The feeling last year was embarrassing. We were disappointed in ourselves, and we ended Coach Barnes’s streak of going to the N.C.A.A. tournament.”

Five players, the top four scorers among them, left the team. Kabongo, like Brown, entered the draft but was not picked. Ioannis Papapetrou withdrew from school to play professionally in Greece. Three others transferred.

That may have been a plus, as Ridley and Holland said upperclassmen showed no interest in helping them. Things changed as soon as the incoming freshmen arrived on campus.

“By doing that, you build relationships and built trust with each other,” Holmes said. “And that’s a key thing with building a successful team, knowing that your teammate has your back and knowing you can trust your teammate.”

That, Lanier said, has meant everything.

“In fairness to the group of guys that left, they didn’t necessarily have a group before them because of that cycle that existed the last several years,” he said. “A lot of guys who came in didn’t sign up for blue collar. If you’ve got one foot out the door, it ain’t about being blue collar.

“We need to find guys who really want to be blue collar because that’s who they’re playing for. We think we have that in this group.”

A Mascot With a Tale: Coastal Carolina’s nickname, the
Chanticleers (SHON-tuh-clears), comes from
a rooster in medieval fables. Chaucer’s “The
Canterbury Tales” includes the character.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Blue-Collar Renaissance: Texas Recalls How to Win. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe